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"And my main point is that poverty and privilege are largely accidental. You don’t choose to be born into an income bracket, a country pile, a housing estate, a
by markx2 3y ago
"And my main point is that poverty and privilege are largely accidental. You don’t choose to be born into an income bracket, a country pile, a housing estate, a double barrelled name or a damp tenement bedsit. But ignorance is a choice. And choosing to use your privileges to patronise people whose lives are entirely beyond your experience and comprehension, is a choice."
- avereveard 3y ago[flagged]
- lucideer 3y agothis idea that life decisions like choosing to have kids are always made solely by individuals in a vacuum without any societal nor contextual influence is just such a perfect example of the privilege the gp is describing
- 2devnull 3y agoNobody really makes any choices if you think about people biologically. I like to think people have some freedom and therefore some responsibility. Not too much. But some.
- lucideer 3y agoExactly. Nuance. Every person bears responsibility for every decision they partake in, just as we also need to acknowledge that some have significantly more agency in such engagements than others.
- gosub100 3y ago[flagged]
- ajsnigrutin 3y agoParents sure, but you had nothing to do with your parents bringing you here. Maybe your parents left you a few millions in a trust or even a billions worth family business... or your parents left you outside, in the streets, without school, making you beg others for food to survive. You had literally zero choice of what family you're getting born into.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- avgcorrection 3y agoObviously it’s a lottery to the BABY. This is straightforward Rawls-liberalism.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago> Obviously it’s a lottery to the BABY. You say that like the same baby might conceivably have been born into more than one potential family. But the opposite is true: examine any baby and you'll find that there's only one possible set of parents they can have, barring identical twins.
- avgcorrection 3y agoOh my god. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/original-position/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/original-position/
- thaumasiotes 3y agoAre you saying that the family it is born into is a lottery to the baby, or that you wish we would pretend that it is?
- avgcorrection 3y agoI’m saying that you are being deliberately obtuse. Or something worse.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gosub100 3y ago[flagged]
- ErasticBrub 3y ago[flagged]
- corobo 3y ago"Countless benefits" that you can't get for various reasons or other. Take away the kid and she'd likely have had nothing. Been there lmao. Help is merely the illusion of help in the UK. Why? So people like you can point to it and say "look you're fine" and get on with their day without giving it any thought.
- bobthepanda 3y agoProbably run a functioning economy so that people can earn money at a rate faster than inflation? There’s more than one way to get fed. The UK economy has been one of the worst performers in developed economies since COVID.
- gosub100 3y ago[flagged]
- drcongo 3y agoa) No, it's not 50%. and b) that's not how tax works. And c) to one of your other comments, the UK is not a socialist country, far from it.
- philk10 3y agoYou going to do the Thatcher quote next ""The problem with Socialism is you eventually run out of other peoples' money." ?
- bobthepanda 3y agoRight, because the benefits have gotten significantly better since COVID, not a prime minister totally tanking the economy by promising unfundable tax cuts and getting fired in 43 days, or the general bureaucratic mess that has been Brexit implementation.
- toenail 3y ago> And choosing to use your privileges to patronise people whose lives are entirely beyond your experience and comprehension, is a choice Not sure how that way of thinking is productive. Patronising people is bad in itself. Thinking that people you perceive as "privileged" can't comprehend you is a choice too and a form of ignorance.
- BobaFloutist 3y agoShe didn't say they "can't", she said that they "don't." "Beyond your experience and comprehension" doesn't preclude the acquiring of more experience, it just suggests they don't currently have it. She's pointing specifically at the people that are patronizing, and explaining why specifically their words are patronizing, not saying that nobody with any wealth could ever understand her - if they couldn't, what on earth would be the point of her blog?
- eropple 3y agoThe author did not say can't. In the entire piece, the only person the author used the word can't in reference to was herself, when she was poor. Choice implies a don't and a won't. But, y'know? When those self-same people go on about how You Can Just Cook when--and this is a keyhole view, a single strand of a very nasty knot, don't you dare well-actually on the vertex and not the shape--poverty is directly tied to mental health problems and the attendant executive dysfunctions that frequently come with? It's reasonable to assume either ignorance or malice (or even, though the author does not, the incapability of can't). And adjusting one's pince-nez to hmm-hmm-hmm about perhaps it's actually the poors who are ignorant is, to put a point on it, gross.
- sterlind 3y agoEspecially considering what the author's been through with vindictive council busybodies making her live even that much more difficult out of sheer spite - like when they cut off her bennies before her first check even came in because they'd read about her deal in the paper - I think she held back rather more than I could in such a situation.
- deleted 3y ago
- MichaelZuo 3y ago> But ignorance is a choice. Is that true for this case? Understanding the actual on-the-ground situation for all types of people and situations in the 10 largest countries will probably take up most of a normal human lifespan. And that's assuming they spend several hours a week, 50 weeks a year, learning. Understanding India and China alone to that level would probably take up 30-40 years. It seems literally impossible for the vast vast majority of people to have enough time for that ignorance to have been a meaningful choice. i.e. This is likely the baseline default for nearly everyone, who are not especially interested in the UK or who are not super-geniuses.
- eropple 3y agoWhen you consider the actual context of the essay and that the person to whom the author is speaking directly is the sister of an MP and herself a MEP, this kind of well-actually does ring hollow.
- toyg 3y agoThe sister of a generationally-wealthy MP, both the products of extremely wealthy families who did not have to work for their money (which is why they are both in politics - because they're pretty useless everywhere else).
- bdsa 3y agoSister
- andrewflnr 3y agoWhen you make an argument in general terms, you can't call no-fair when someone takes it at face value and counter-argues in equally general terms. That's not cheating, it's just assuming good faith.
- mftrhu 3y agoWhen people point out that one's counter-argument, by virtue of ignoring the context the original argument is steeped in, is not actually countering any argument, they aren't saying that the counter-argument is "cheating" - they are adding context.
- ErasticBrub 3y ago[flagged]
- lawn 3y ago> But ignorance is a choice. No, it's not always a choice. You might be born in a family and community that actively brainwashes their members and prevents you from coming into contact with conflicting information. This can even be true in less severe circumstances, such as being bombarded with propaganda on social media, which essentially hacks your brain.
- dylan604 3y agoI too disagree with that statement. Ignorance is just ignorance. What would make the GP's comment more accurate would be willful ignorance, but even that is stretching. To me, willful ignorance is just a sugar coating for a much more accurate/harsh description of what is actually happening.
- ncr100 3y agoI had a friend from a rough upbringing who called it, "poverty mindset". Eg you have a success in your life? Prepare to be shunned and thought of with disdain by your community.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- m3kw9 3y agoEverything you do is luck starting with the day you were born, you decide to eat an egg? Yeah it’s because you are t allergic or have money, you have money? Your parents had money. You have money? Because you had a job. You have a job? Maybe because you had a functioning brain, good hand/feet. It’s all luck in that sense. You decide to just wait for luck to come after reading this? It was also luck you read this comment
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- PuffinBlue 3y agoThe next sentence is: > Choosing to use the powers vested in you by the constituencies you serve, to deprive those same constituents of light, heating, food and home security is a wilful and deliberate act. And it has to stop. It’s abundantly clear that the whole passage was speaking to Rees-Mogg, calling her out for her Marie Antoinette ‘let them eat potatoes’. This passage isn’t a generalism, is a specific response to the words of a former politician, a former Conservative MP and MEP for East Midlands. To reduce the articles substance to a specially selected out of context quote such as OP highlighted seems disingenuous.